American Battery

Good story about batteries on Oil Price: Trump's Grid Battery Ban Leaves Developers Guessing

I'm not quite sure what to think about China. They have made great strides since Nixon changed the rules. Now they are competing with us much the way the Rooskies were doing back in the sixties.

3D Figurines

3D Custom Figurine

TEMU, source of endless amusement, has done it again. You send them a picture of someone and they will 3D print a figurine based on that photo for like $15. The figure is about six inches tall.

Spy Game - Netflix Movie

Spy Game (2001) - Official Trailer - Brad Pitt Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Directed by Tony Scott famous for any number of films but I'll just mention Top Gun. He is also the younger brother of Ridley Scott famous for Alien.

The story recounts Nathan (Robert Redford) and Tom's (Brad Pitt) history of working together as spooks for the CIA. Now Tom has tried to pull off a stunt to rescue his girlfriend and gotten himself in a terrible jam. The big-shots at the CIA aren't willing to try and save him because reasons, so Nathan uses his retirement fund to engineer an op to rescue him. It's probably going to land Nathan in hot water, but he's a spook, he'll elude his pursuers. And Tom and his girlfriend will owe him.

Found a more complete synopsis here with the catchphrase: 

A thriller than seems more real than fiction

which is pretty accurate.

Can't tell who wrote it. It's a website with one review of this one movie. It uses the acronym MACV-SOG without defining it, so I asked Google:

MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group)

Espionage is a dirty business. Assets in the spy trade are people who can get the information about the enemy that the agents want. However, to spooks, assets aren't people, they are just objects to use to get what you want and as soon as they are no longer useful or you have gotten what you want, they get dropped. If they fall into a burning pile of shit, well too bad. Good agents are not going to waste any tears for them. No wonder the CIA is so popular.

Cast I recognized:

• Robert Redford as Nathan Muir
• Brad Pitt as Tom Bishop
• Catherine McCormack as Elizabeth Hadley
• Michael Paul Chan is familiar to us for his role as Lieutenant Michael Tao in The Closer
• Marianne Jean-Baptiste is familiar to us because we've seen her in like a zillion different shows.

Volga Hydrofoil 70
Wm Schimmel

Somewhere around the 1:10:00 mark, the Sheik catches a ride from Cyprus to Beirut, a distance of  maybe 120 miles, in speedboat equipped with hydrofoils. Never seen the like. Google thinks it might be a Volga, a Soviet boat.

The Vendetta of An - Netflix Series

Official Trailer】The Vendetta of An: The game is set and the players are gathering in Chang'an!🔥
YOUKU English-Get APP now

Chinese historical drama. Slow moving as in glacial. The lead is seeking revenge on the high court officials who murdered his parents 15 years ago. Seems to be a common theme lately. The show is pretty good, but somewhere past midway, some of the people inexplicably change alliances. Makes them seem inscrutable, but I think the writers were just trying to stir the pot. 

The show starts off with An getting a promotion or something that is sending him to the capital. Before he leaves, he kills a local man, a man who he has had dealings with for years. He kills him because he was somehow connected to his parent's murder. I don't understand why he waited for so long to kill him, other than he will be far away when the murder is discovered. Just weird, man.

I remember one old guy, a general or a mystic or something, in any case someone with clout, a prisoner in an underground prison. Not really clear who's holding him, some northern warlord if I remember correctly. He keeps popping up in the show and eventually we hear he has been released, but I'm not sure we ever see him again before is back in prison. I don't think we ever figured out just who he is or why he's important.

Lisa Nur Maulidia has a slightly overwrought review on Medium.

28 episodes, approximately 45 minutes each. If you're diligent you can finish it in about a week. It's probably been a couple of months since we've seen it. I've just been a little slow about getting this written.

Kinmen Island 1949

The Battle that Saved Taiwan - Kinmen Island 1949
Historigraph

I didn't get much 20th century Chinese history when I was in school. Something about Japan bad, and we helped the Chinese fight against the bad Japanese, but that was about it. Only much later did I hear that the Communists abandoned the fight and marched West and hid out until the Japanese were defeated, then came back and kicked the war weary nationalists over the strait to Taiwan.

Anyway, Kinmen Island looked familiar because it's the home of the Black Dragon Howitzers.

SS Tjitjalengka

SS Tjitjalengka at Amoy Harbor in China - Robert G. Lloyd

Australian War Memorial

The 16,700 ton British hospital ship Tjitjalengka. Built for the Java-China-Japan-Line in 1939 and owned by a Dutch shipping company, the Tjitjalengka was requisitioned for Admiralty service on 8 July 1942 and was converted in Liverpool, England to accommodate 504 patients. After service in the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans, she was transferred to the British Pacific Fleet. After the Japanese surrender, she carried Allied Prisoners of War (POWs) repatriated from Japan to Australia. On her final voyage, she carried invalids and Naval casualties from Colombo and Durban to Liverpool, England and was then returned to her owners.

Royal Navy Research Archive has a longer history of this ship.

The artist, Robert G. Lloyd has done numerous marine paintings.

Tjitjalengka, Indonesia

Amoy Harbor, China is directly across the strait from Taiwan.

SS Yih Lee

SS Yih Lee berthed at Dinghai, Zhoushan, China, circa 1929

Poking around, I turned up a couple of sites devoted to old Chinese steamships:

• Old China Coast Ships
• Eddie Steamship

The Longest Promise - Netflix Series

ENG SUB】Xiao Zhan | The Longest Promise’s new trailer.
肖战影音会DAYTOY•Xiao Zhan

Chinese historical fantasy drama romance. We stepped off our well trod path of Chinese history dramas into fantasyland and were pleasantly surprised. 

Normally I am not too keen on fantasy, I like my stories firmly rooted in reality, though I will allow things that might be plausible in the future. But this show is none of that, we have all kinds of magic, and then I remembered Arthur C. Clarke's third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

We are surrounded by all kinds of whiz-bang doo-dads these days and I suspect that most people have no idea how they work, and moreover, they don't care. So to them, modern life is a lot like watching this Chinese fantasy.

Peiying has a fine review here.

The show has some spectacular scenery, but the pace is glacial. I think I slept through about half of it.

43 episodes

Ashes to Crown - Netflix Series

【OFFICIAL TRAILER】Ashes to Crown is officially coming your way! Premiering June 2 at 12 PM (GMT+8) !
YOUKU English-Get APP now

The opening for this bog-standard Chinese historical drama is pretty cool, and very unusual. Our girl is smitten with a charming scoundrel and is about to marry him when a giant bell falls from it's support. When it hits the ground it makes a resounding gong, as you would expect. While this sound is reverberating, our girl experiences a vision of what her life will be with this man and realizes he is a downright evil son-of-a-bitch. By the time the sound has faded she has decided to destroy her fiancé by any means possible. Kind of funny that she was able to experience months of life in those few seconds, but dream time is like that.

After that, it's a pretty bog-standard feminist fantasy. Pretty boys and girls, fabulous clothes, ridiculously elaborate jewelry on the girls and super-silly headgear on the boys, plenty of secret plots and court intrigue, fantastical sword fights and large scale battles. Oh yeah, there is a love story front and center and naturally they have to overcome all kinds of obstacles, at least half of which are conjured up by our girl.

We've watched the first ten episodes and now it is being released like, one episode every day or so. I've seen so many of these that I no longer pay close attention. Shoot, I can even take a nap while it's playing and when I wake up I don't feel like I've missed anything. I think the part I like best about these shows is the amount of detail they show. Very rarely do I spot anything out of place. The girls are pretty cute, too.

Who Rules Trade Rules?

Containers stacked far and wide

From Jamestown:

The Chinese ‘Rules and Future’ of Global Trade

Executive Summary:

• The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is shaping global trade standards in data control and customs clearance. These standards give preference to Chinese platforms that provide Beijing with end-to-end visibility into global shipping.
• No Western equivalent of this system exists, and the resulting data asymmetry could enable PRC actors to identify supply chain chokepoints, exploit dependencies in critical resources, and circumvent tariffs, sanctions, and export controls.
• Chinese trade platforms gain international power via bilateral adoption agreements, multilateral institutions like the World Customs Organization, and standards-setting bodies led by Alibaba and state-run LOGINK. This ecosystem embeds Chinese platforms and norms into global trade infrastructure, locking in adoption and displacing alternatives.

Sounds like something that the rest of the world should get in front of. Or maybe it doesn't matter if the Chinese establish the standards, they'll probably do a pretty good job. Of course the Chinese could use this system to their advantage, but any centrally planned system is going to have weak spots and properly motivated outsiders will probe and eventually find those weak spots, so people who don't think they are getting a fair shake are going to exploit those weak spots.

National Unity

 China is making it a law. From Jamestown:

New Law Engineers Unity

Executive Summary:

• The new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress gives legal form to Xi Jinping’s campaign to “forge a collective national consciousness,” transforming Xi Jinping’s ethnic policy agenda into a binding mandate across the entire Party-state.
• The law further hollows out the older framework of regional ethnic autonomy by subordinating minority languages, cultures, histories, and identities to a singular, Han-dominated vision of the “Zhonghua minzu.”
• Its most revealing feature is the scale of the machinery it mobilizes: schools, textbooks, museums, media platforms, families, cadres, budgets, security organs, and diaspora-facing institutions are all made responsible for producing the desired national consciousness. Unity is no longer treated as a social condition to be preserved, but as an administrative outcome to be engineered, monitored, and enforced.

I wonder if maybe we need a little of this. Meanwhile, I understand why good old Joe Biden allowed massive immigration, he wanted to secure a permanent Democratic majority, or at least that's the prevailing right wing theory. What I don't understand is why the Europeans have allowed massive immigration from Africa and the Arabia. Are they also hoping for a permanent Democratic majority?

Zhangjiakou Power Station

Zhangjiakou Power Station located in Hebei Province, China

Coal fired power plant 90 miles northwest of Bejing.

Pursuit of Jade - Netflix Series

[ENG SUB] Zhu Yu / Chasing Jade First Trailer | Zhang Linghe, Tian Xiawei
Dawn

Great show. This is another Chinese historical drama / feminist fantasy much like Unveil: Jadewind. This one is more light hearted and includes some comedy. We still have the inscrutable machinations of the Imperial Court operating in the background threatening to visit terror and destruction on our happy little town, but meanwhile everyday life goes on.

Like Unveil: Jadewind, our girl is an orphan. However, this time instead of being a princess our girl is a pig butcher. How she manages to slaughter pigs without messing up her fancy clothes, hair and makeup would be amazing, except, well, this is a fantasy. She also looks to be about 100 pounds soaking wet, but has no problem tackling a horde of thugs. Her father trained her in the martial arts, you know.

We're about half way through and it's been snowing ever since we started, but these folks are really tough, or they have incredibly warm clothes, because nobody ever bothers to shut the windows.

There are 40 episodes and they are releasing one or two a day until the end of the month.

Unveil: Jadewind - Netflix Series

Official Trailer】Unveil: Jadewind: The mysterious veil will eventually be unveiled by me!💥😎| YOUKU
YOUKU English-Get APP now

This show is a little odd. The characters are like something out of a comic book. The sets are fabulous. Our girl and her intellectual sidekick investigate murders in and around the imperial palace. Every murder starts out looking like a simple case but they all become more twisted as they look into them.

The first case involves an illegal brothel where rich, powerful men are abusing young women. There is one guy who seems to be at the center of this. He knows who all the players are, but he dies. Does this sound like Epstein's island or what?

The more our girl looks into these cases, the more she runs into political roadblocks. Now that I think about it, this is exactly what's going on in our own government. We hear about all this malfeasance but no charges are ever laid, and certainly no one is ever convicted.

The sets are so great I looked into it. See what I found:

The World's Largest Film Studio Is Home to 30,000 Actors
Goldthread

The Largest Outdoor Film Studio is Actually in China
Smithsonian Channel

Hengdian World Studios

34 episodes, 50 minutes each

Casting Big Aluminum Pieces

China’s One Piece EV Frame The Aluminium Engineering Breakthrough
PRV Engineering Ltd

This video is just a marketing blurb. I looked but did not find anything more substantive. This video got me started, but it's just this guy talking for four minutes. The company behind this might be Hantek, but I only found a couple of references to them. The only Hantek I found seems to be mostly involved in electronics.

Aluminium frame wall thickness ranges from 4 mm to 50 mm in a single cast.

This might be the frame Hantek is actually casting. 

Communist China

United Front-Linked Organizations Identified by Country

Jamestown posted this story by Cheryl Yu about China's United Front System today (Google search). It's a little long (3000 words, more or less), I just read the executive summary which I copied and pasted below. How do combat this kind of invasion?

Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States

Executive Summary: 

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a global network of individuals and organizations as part of its united front system. In four democratic states—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany—this network includes more than 2,000 organizations. These constitute latent capacity that the Party can mobilize to advance the Party’s agenda.
• Beijing’s network is the product of protracted co-optation of existing civil society organizations overseas and the global expansion of domestic united front elements. The Party has spent decades assiduously cultivating overseas Chinese community organizations, co-opting local leaders and institutions to embed its preferences within civil society. Even groups that previously spent decades supporting the Republic of China (Taiwan) now fly the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
• The Party leverages this global network to support its primary goal of national rejuvenation. According to the Party’s definition, rejuvenation entails unification with Taiwan and making the PRC the global leader in terms of national power. United front work supports this goal by contributing to the PRC’s diplomatic, economic, scientific, and even military development, as well as the Party’s ability to respond to crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
• This includes engaging in malign and illegal activities in foreign countries. Overseas groups with ties to the united front have directly supported illicit technology transfer, espionage, talent recruitment, and voter mobilization on Beijing’s behalf. These groups also engage in transnational repression, monitoring, harassing, and/or intimidating dissidents, ethnic minorities, and other critics of the Party.
• In democratic countries, these groups influence political decision-making by conditioning stakeholders to consider Beijing’s interests and sensitivities. United front organizations have been instrumental in shaping the approaches of local governments and political actors, particularly where oversight is weak. They have influenced legislation and public statements, and managed official engagements with the PRC.
• Where the CCP encounters opposition, the united front functions as a political weapon to isolate, neutralize, or counter Beijing’s critics. The united front system leverages its network of organizations to remove impediments to the achievement of core CCP ambitions through influence, subversion, co-optation, and coercion. These goals include building support for and neutralizing resistance to the annexation of Taiwan.
• Constraining the CCP’s ability to interfere in democracies requires active transparency. Much of the CCP’s united front activity is at least partially visible in democratic societies. Better education and information sharing could help officials and the general public recognize risks and avoid entanglement. United front groups are rarely listed in existing foreign agent registration systems, limiting the ability of governments to monitor or investigate them.

Joseph McCarthy may have been a slimeball, but it kind of looks like he was right about the commies.

WEST & EAST

Interior of the French Tokamak in Cadaraches

The CEA (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives) Cadarache research center in southern France operates the WEST (Tungsten Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a, tokamak that set a new world record on February 12, 2025, by sustaining a 50 million-degree Celsius plasma for 1,337 seconds (over 22 minutes). - Google 

The chemical symbol for Tungsten is W, which is how they cobble together the acronym.

The entire complex is blurred out on Google Maps. Huh.

EAST vacuum vessel

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), also known as HT-7U (Hefei Tokamak 7 Upgrade), is an experimental superconducting tokamak magnetic fusion energy reactor in Hefei, China. Operated by the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science conducting its experiments for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, EAST began its operations in 2006. EAST is part of the international ITER program after China joined the initiative in 2003 and acts as a testbed for ITER technologies. On January 20, 2025, it sustained plasma for 1066 seconds.

EAST was the first tokamak to utilize superconducting coils to establish both the toroidal and poloidal magnetic fields[citation needed]. - Wikipedia

Puzzle of the Day

Zhujajiao Water Town, Shanghai, China

Google Maps,  Wikipedia

Nanpu Bridge

Nanpu Bridge Shanghai China

There is a big river that goes through Shanghai, the Yangtze, but this bridge doesn't cross it. It crosses the much smaller Huangpu River that runs through downtown.

Shanghai China

I went to Google Earth to get this map. Google Earth can give you grid lines, which are kind of important when you are looking at large areas. Since this part of the world seems to be a hot bed of hostility, I want to remind myself of the relative positions of these players. Of course all that hostility might just be something the media hype because it gets them more eyeballs, and we all know that more eyeballs means more advertising dollars, which is the real reason they are in business. Makes me wonder if any of this purported hostility is real, I mean there's still a zillion dollars worth of trade going on with all these countries, well, except for North Korea. Russia seems to be the only ones doing business with them. 

Google Earth crashed twice while I was trying to get the view I wanted.

Chinese Factory Automation

China’s Dark Factories: So Automated, They Don't Need Lights | WSJ
The Wall Street Journal

This story on ZeroHedge got me started:

'Most Humbling Thing I've Ever Seen': Western Business Leaders 'Terrified' After Touring Chinese Factories